Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language (2015)
nautil.us
nautil.us
What this is trying to say is that human languages all over the world come up with color names in a similar path, but they stop at different points.
It's all very fascinating, and interestingly is the argument some use against strong AI -- that is they believe that to truly understand language you must have a human or human-like body that can perceive the world in the same way as a human, because these color words develop based on the physical properties of your eye and brain. For example, many people that are blind from birth have a hard time understanding the concept of color.
A few of you mentioned that Russian has two words for red. Russian is actually at the end of the spectrum (pun intended) -- that is they have the maximum number of color words.
English is close but we don't have separate words for blue and light blue.
You can see this as English speaking children learn words -- they will call "pink" "red" until they learn pink, and will almost always learn "red" before "pink".
Some cultures just stop with "warm" and "cold" (which are red orange yellow vs green blue purple).
Ah the joys of being a CogSci major -- we had entire weeks of classes devoted to this.
Azure. Celeste. Cerulean. Cyan. Teal. Turqouise. aqua. Aquamarine. Lapis.
Basic color terms need to be:
- monolexemic ("green", but not "light green" or "forest green"),
- high-frequency, and
- agreed upon by speakers of that language.[7]
All of those words you listed aren't high frequency.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms
For instance, what is high frequency?
And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree?
The 300 most frequent words in a representative corpus of text.
> And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree?
Blind speakers represent a small portion of all speakers, so even if every one of them disagrees, the majority of speakers will still agree.
That doesn't seem to be a very good definition. As we subdivide colors into greater specificity, it'll naturally occur that each subdivision is referenced fewer times. So this definition intrinsically precludes a discovery of finer distinctions.
IMHO, the whole idea that language shapes thought and perception (see TFA reference to Whorf) is overblown. I've seen this refuted where one person made the claim that while Nepalese(?) has a term for "mountain peak", English has no such word. The reply was: "of course it has a term for this: 'mountain peak'". As expert language users, we have no trouble synthesizing new concepts by using our language, which after all is far more than just a list of words, to frame our thoughts.
I once was sitting near an argument about whether an object was blue or purple, and they decided to drag me into the argument. Not wanting to take sides, I said "how about periwinkle?", and they both seemed satisfied with that answer.
That's true but their relative frequency will not change. Ie. if your only words are warm and cold you may see each of those 6% of the time, but if your have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple then you will see each one 2% of the time.
But in both cases all the other color related words in the language would be significantly less than 2%.
The big 11:
red 12,110,000,000
orange 7,040,000,000
yellow 6,370,000,000
green 13,850,000,000
blue 15,100,000,000
purple 10,160,000,000
black 13,390,000,000
white 12,330,000,000
gray 14,950,000,000
brown 10,160,000,000
pink 4,700,000,000
... and some test cases
maroon 152,000,000
teal 7,320,000,000
navy 870,000,000
cyan 110,000,000
I think the frequency explanation has trouble, since "teal" has more hits than "orange", "yellow", and (by a lot) "pink".
Usually you remove proper nouns when doing a word frequency analysis.
Pink, Maroon and Navy are all proper nouns -- Singer/songwriter, band (Maroon 5), and branch of the military.
Also, a Google search only gets you documents that have that word at least once, but removes duplicates. So maybe the page with red has it listed 7,000 times but you wouldn't know.
Trying using all the text in Project Gutenberg[0], removing the proper nouns, and then run the analysis again.
Linguists have done this for you already -- and the results were that your top list are in the top 300 and the bottom are not.
https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
This isn't just a comic - Randall Munroe ran a color naming survey on internet users. Native language was not collected. I assume native English speakers were over-represented but not universal.
Interestingly there was a slight gender difference in naming among respondents (see the second table). Is that perceptual or a cultural gender-specific difference in how often men or women talk about color?
It's perceptual. Women have a higher cone to rod ratio, making them see colors easier while men see movement better. Also women are more likely to be tetracromats (four different cones instead of three).
There are some unproven evolutionary reasons that this may be the case -- men needed better movement detection to hunt while women needed better color vision to detect bad food when gathering.
There are some anecdotes that colourblind sharpshooters find it easier to see through camouflage as they're more sensitive to shapes (i.e. because for them a lot of things are "naturally camouflaged" they have more experience detecting shapes) but I'm not sure how factual they are.
I'd say the 1 in 12 vs 1 in 200 difference alone might account for a significant difference when looking at a uniform sample of both sexes.
http://www.sherwin-williams.com/homeowners/color/find-and-ex...
This is where the article (and maybe the underlying studies?) seems to go off the rails:
asked him or her to name each one’s “basic color term”—the simplest, broadest word that described its shade
If I (a native English speaker) were asked in those terms to describe the coloration of an object, I think I'd conclude that I would need to limit my answers to "warm" and "cold". These are certainly color concepts in English, and indeed, as a photography enthusiast I work with them all the time when I edit my photos in Lightroom. So I can't see why they've then broadened the terms out to the more specific red, orange, etc., as more general terms are available.
The article seems to make an overture toward the possibility of thinking in colors even outside of the hue, saturation, and value model that westerners at least seem to think in - which could be very interesting. But the question above also seems to preclude such a discovery. As I read it, "shade" seems to be synonymous with "hue", thus demanding that I follow our familiar model. But if a different word were substituted for "shade", like the generic term "color", I think I would have answered that the most generic words available in English are "light" and "dark". (That, of course, is basically the V in HSV, and not a different model, but still provides another set of possible English terms of broader foundational breadth than "red", "orange", etc.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/medical-education/reprints/1997-Percept...
Or relativism is truer for less tangible things (like how we deal with societal and abstract notions based on our language) than about stuff we experience directly, like color.
The actual relativist core is not about "only being able to think X if you have words for it" (which is bogus imho), it's about the "language shapes perception" part.
Besides, abstractions are not just built on/from language -- else they would be meaningless names. They are based on experiences -- which are not just experiences of actual tangible things but also of circumstances, common feelings, etc. Freedom for example, while an abstract notion, is painfully "tangible" as an experience when its taken away from you, whether you are Japanese or Irish, etc, so one would expect all cultures to form the relevant words to describe it (and that is the case).
Thus one could think of freedom even without having access to the word -- just by having in his mind the relevant sensation (as a mental picture, etc).
But even more so, a system of language (associated words and notions) also shapes how we approach freedom beyond the basic underlying sentiment.
In software design, sometimes I know that I am working within a certain project-specific "space" in my head that informs the decisions I'm making. It has structure, influenced by the structure of the project and by my problem-solving approach; but there aren't any words in there, and I'd be hard pressed to give it a better name than "a mental model." And yet it's a palpable "thing," it's often unique to the specific project, and it is useful in getting the work done -- I definitely notice when I get distracted and lose track of it, and recognize it when it I find it again.
I'm trying hard not to sound all fancy and mystical about this -- it's not magical stuff. It's just tricky to talk about kinds of abstractions that don't lend themselves well to being named. :)
Have considerable experience of being "wine-eyed", I can assure you my eyes are generally gleaming. :-)
https://archive.org/stream/greekenglishlex00lidduoft#page/10...
The first three images google gave me for "kindergarten colors":
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kkd-_JfiGWA/TUdXevHfRUI/AAAAAAAAAb...
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/fe/a8/da/fea8dad8f...
In Russian, sky blue is a distinct rainbow color from blue, but pink is not.
In English, blue and indigo are treated as distinct colors, but this is more tradition than perception (so as to pad the number to the requisite 7).
If you compare the typical representation of the rainbow, you'll see that it has the corresponding difference. Russian depiction of rainbow has pure medium-dark blue between sky blue and violet, and violet is dark:
http://nobacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Rainbow-26.png
(Note that blue in this pic is about as dark as it gets; quite often it's actually lighter - usually, sky blue and blue are closer together than blue and violet.)
English depiction of rainbow has some kind of really dark blue with a strong hint of violet in the same place, and violet is brighter:
I think this is really similar to the two blues in Russian. Interestingly, while I grew up speaking Russian, I learned English at a young-enough age that I actually find the distinction between the two blues a bit confusing at time—I know about it, obviously, but it actually feels less strong than the distinction between red and pink. But that's just me with my weird upbringing :).
In English we have blue and cyan, but the word cyan is rarely used except to distinguish from blue.
For English speakers, in everyday usage both are just "red." English has more specific words for red but we don't use them much.
This is a great example of why context-free machine translation is impossible. If you were to translate "red wine" as piros bor (instead of vörösbor) it would be ridiculous.
Red isn't a color, it's a spectrum. It encompasses a whole range of colors. You use it to describe a similar set of colors when specificity isn't required ("What was that red thing?" vs "I think it would look good in crimson"), like most things in English.
Until a few hundred years ago, pink things were simple "light red" things in English (and many other languages) - we didn't have the word pink and so couldn't express the colour without using relative terms.
They don't. "Red" doesn't exist as a concept except abstractly. Words like "scarlet" and "teal" have been used since middle English to describe colors.
In other words: it's not that English works the way he described (it doesn't), but instead the inverse: Hungarian doesn't have an equivalent for "red".
In other languages, that grouping is done differently, and two colors that would both be appropriate to call "red" in English don't have a single common color term at all.
To get a feel of how this looks from the other side, consider various Asian languages that don't distinguish green and blue, and have a single word that has to be translated as "green or blue" to English.
We also have "Ka-chol" ("ch" pronounced like "phlegm" in "Achmad the Dead Terrorist") for blue and "Tche-let" for light blue, which are words you learn in kindergarten and use every day (you say "sky is Tche-let", never "sky is Ka-chol". When have you last heard someone describe a mid-day summer sky in English as anything but "blue"?)
Sure, we also have artist words for a thousand variations of blue: turquoise, aqua, aquamarine, etc'. In fact, just like in English, we use the French terms as is. But nobody learns them in kindergarten.
This isn't a color disagreement. The Thai word for red is otherwise identical to the red English speakers know of, and there are other words for the actual colors of yolks (i.e. yellow or orange) and Thai chickens don't produce red yolks :(
In a similar way, if I remember correctly, Apple used to be the English word for all fruit[1]. We later added specific words for more fruits, and Apple only remains as the name of a single fruit - however, we still have 'Pineapples', which gained the name when apple was a generic fruit moniker.
Apparently it's common for blue and green to be clumped together - green (midori) is a surprisingly recent term in Japanese, so lots of green things are referred to as blue (aoi) because of traditional usage - including the green light on traffic lights, apparently.[2]
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apple#Etymology [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Maybe it's not a common color term there, either - the most context I've heard it in was describing a dachshund's hair color[1], and the second most common is describing a redhead's hair. Maybe the English equivalent is "ginger", but I always thought of ginger as being a much lighter color.
[1] http://www.allsmalldogbreeds.com/breeds/dachshund-smooth.jpg <-- an example. Это рыжая такса.
Also, do parents who moved abroad have kids with different perception? And would have analysis in some genetic factors (as babies seem to indicate) and the cultural influence.
In my experience, sample size=1, you don't talk that much with a baby about colors. The article doesn't explain details, and that made me wonder: is this genetic? Cultural? How does it goes when the parents have different cultures? Moving to another city/country changes that? Being in a nursery with caregivers of the same/different culture?
Once I read a discussion about teaching your child colors, and how some take longer to differentiate colors from the object, so that color is an attribute and not _the_ object. That's where this caught my attention.
It's mostly discredited now, but that's exactly the position being discussed in the article.
Unjustly so. There is experimental evidence that at least in for some languages and some colors, language affects the ability to distinguish colors.
Here is one example: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.short
> English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).
As long as the boundaries are the same we can perceive something different, call it the same, and never be confused; all the while 'seeing' a completely different colour to one another.
I'm colour-blind (a bit red-green, a bit other things) - that's a blurring of boundaries; so we absolutely will disagree on what a colour is (though oddly I can literally see colours change in front of me once I 'know').
Why is it so implausible that people may have the same boundaries, but with things swapped such that they experience a different 'colour', say what you see to be 'blue', every time that you say 'red'? They'll still call it 'red'. You'll agree every time you see it.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=define+rouge+&oq=define+rouge http://www.dictionary.com/browse/rouge